Vegetable “noodles”
I’m still “mostly” doing the South Beach Diet, although I haven’t been nearly as religious about it as I should be lately (I’ve definitely fallen off the cookie wagon). I’m paying much more attention to the foods I eat and their whole-grain and sugar content, which is definitely a good thing.
Regular pasta is a no-no, and the allowed serving size of whole-grain pasta is so small that most of the time it hardly seems worth the bother. One of the diet’s creative “tricks” is to substitute squash for the pasta—strands of spaghetti squash or thin strips of yellow squash or zucchini. Since I had some squash sitting around, I decided to try this earlier in the week. My mandoline won’t make really thin strips (and my knife skills aren’t up to the challenge), so I did long julienne strips. You could boil the squash “noodles” for a short time, until they’re tender but still a bit crisp, then put the spaghetti sauce on top for a more traditional presentation. I decided to stir-fry them with some onion strips, then added the spaghetti sauce directly to the saucepan until heated (fewer pans to mess with!). Topped with parmesan cheese, it was a great, quick summer meal—and something I think I’ll make fairly often, since we’re about to hit the “everybody has extra squash from their garden” season.
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